The Virtues of Ruthlessness: What the Out-There X Prize Winners Can Teach Automakers

The Auto X Prize winners have been crowned, and they're a trio of radical cars that we don't expect to see them in showrooms anytime soon. The on-sale date, however, is hardly the point. Here's what the auto industry needs to take away from this historical competition.

The logic goes something like this: Carbon-based energy is finite. Cars burn too much of that limited resource. So the cars of the future should, maybe must, devour less and less energy. Ultimately, fingers crossed, vehicles will be powered by what our benighted present-day brains might as well just call magic. Barring that, they will sip whatever fuel we continue to wage war over. This is not opinion. It's reason. And it's what the Progressive Insurance Automotive X-Prize is all about. Participating teams were asked to produce a vehicle that could achieve 100 mpge (the energy-equivalent of 100 miles per gallon, since entries could be powered by anything, including batteries or biofuel), without sacrificing safety. The winners of this $10 million competition were announced today, and they are exceptional machines, the proud offspring of hard truths and even harder engineering solutions.

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They're also fairly ridiculous. The Auto X Prize guidelines claim that the contest must "result in real cars available for purchase, not concept cars."

It's technically feasible that the three winning vehicles could be produced, and sold. But even the "mainstream" class winner, the Very Light Car from Edison2, would be laughed out of the current market. On paper, it is a genuine people mover, a two-door car that seats four and runs on a 250cc single-cylinder engine, powered by E85 ethanol. In person, it's a retro-sci-fi prop, like a flying car whose wings (or thrusters) were clipped, and is now forced to putter around on tiny landing gear. A Silicon Valley magnate might park the VLC, or possibly one of the two "alternative" class winners, next to his Tesla Roadster, but to call any of the X-Prize champs a potential niche product is an act of uncommon journalistic kindness.

And yet, like any respectable sideshow, the freakish winners of the Auto X Prize pose a threat to our collective standards of beauty and identity. Over the course of the competition, the vehicles most recognizable as cars gradually fell away, until the final pack of surviving entries looked more and more like outcasts from a discarded future—one of the two "alternative" class winners, the E-Tracer, is like the Lightcycles from Tron, only weirder, with two primary wheels, and another stubby pair that automatically lowers and retracts based on the current speed. But just as these machines were born from hard truths, they have a harsh message for the larger automotive industry and market. On the road to true fuel-efficiency, there are no design compromises.

The vehicles splitting the $10 million purse aren't downsized traditional autos. They aren't modded Mini Coopers or slick electric sports cars. Those are the ones that lost. When our own automotive editors sized up the teams in 2008, we predicted that Aptera was in a "head-to-head race with Tesla to Californian homes and the X Prize purse—we give the Aptera the lead by a nose." In fact, Tesla's entry didn't even make the finals, and Aptera's 2e was beat out by the Wave II from Li-ion Motors, whose three tiny wheels are so fully enclosed, the electric vehicle appears to be hovering.

In the end, the Auto X Prize turned out to be far more radical and subversive than it originally appeared. By crowning a trio of truly bizarre vehicles, the competition may have sacrificed some measure of relevance. But for those in the automotive industry, the diverse pack of winners is making a single point. They are all utterly ruthless designs. They prove that reliably cracking 100 mpgs means dropping all extraneous weight, adopting airplane-like contours to reduce the drag-coefficient, and achieving safety by any means necessary, even if it means projecting the wheels outside of the VLC's frame for added stability. This is what it takes to push the state of the art forward, and come anywhere close to a carbon-free future.

Like the champs themselves, the X Prize didn't compromise. As a result, no one is going to buy these winners. But standards change slowly, revolutions start somewhere, and what was ugly or strident or ridiculous a generation ago is status quo today. The VLC will not be cruising onto a freeway near you. However, don't be surprised if the 2025 Corolla looks more like a beached escape pod, and less like the wheeled-bricks we've been driving for more than 100 carbon-chugging years.